Articles By Dale Borglum

Loving Someone and Healing

Loving and healing are two very different ways we can open ourselves to others – friends, clients, anyone. Many of the people I interact with either have a life-threatening illness or are grieving the loss of a loved one, situations that cry out for spiritual healing – merging my mind with the one mind and then merging my mind with the mind of the client or friend. In no way am I doing the healing nor am I focusing on the illness or suffering or imbalance, but instead resting in inherent wholeness and realizing that my friend also is inherently whole. Basically just remembering God, dissolving into that essence and then remembering my friend in her wholeness. Resting in wholeness is the deepest healing practice. (Read More)

Hardcore Love

All the Scriptures, all the true teachers, tell us that Presence, love, is always available if only we can surrender. If we have faith in God, in the teachings, then Grace and blessing will be revealed.  Some part of us knows that it’s all sacred, that the Beloved can only be everything. Yet seldom is this our experience. We often struggle just to be mindful of what’s going on. (Read More)

Finding the Sacred in Daily Life

All the Scriptures, all the true teachers, tell us that Presence, love, is always available if only we can surrender. If we have faith in God, in the teachings, then Grace and blessing will be revealed.  Some part of us knows that it’s all sacred, that the Beloved can only be everything. Yet seldom is this our experience. We often struggle just to be mindful of what’s going on. (Read More)

Healing the Deepest Wound

Everything is a manifestation of Buddha nature, of Christ consciousness. The Beloved can only be everything. We are each fundamentally radiant, sacred human beings.

Consciousness does not die. Yet as I have worked with groups and with individuals over the years, as well as in my own practice, again and again arise the contractions, the long-held conditionings, that cause us all to suffer. Even though the details of the stories change, the stories are a reflection of the same deep woundedness.
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Path of a Warrior

Wildfires, hurricanes, mass shootings, politics, friends diagnosed with cancer– is it really possible to keep our hearts open when there seems to be so much pain in the world? I admit that the recent wildfires in Northern California which deeply affected people I know personally impacted me more than the major tragedies not so close to home. Keeping our hearts constantly open to all suffering is impossible, yet the price we pay for avoiding contact with suffering is often unknowingly deadening.
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Intimacy with Fear

My dear friend and colleague Stephen Levine died earlier this year. Stephen was a wonderful writer and meditation teacher, but he is primarily remembered as the pioneer who brought conscious dying to America. This happened in the late 1970’s and the 1980’s, a time when people spoke very little about death and certainly not about conscious dying. (Read More)

Devotion as Loving Everyone

I’ve been meditating since the 1960s. My mind is calmer. My ego structure is less intrusive and cumbersome. Insight and wisdom have increased. The longer I am on this wonderful and challenging path to freedom from fear, the clearer it becomes the essence of this journey is devotion, in particular, its expression in loving and serving our fellow beings. (Read More)

Great Compassion

We are two-fold beings, at once human and divine, finite and infinite, dualistic and non-dualistic. On one hand we have a body and a personality that change, that age, that experience happiness and pain, that eventually die. (Read More)

The Beloved Can Only Be Everything

The poet Rumi wisely said that grief is the garden of compassion. In a fundamental sense, spiritual practice is the inner work of transforming the separation inherent in grief into the connectedness of compassion, which is our true nature. (Read More)

Fear of Death

I’m glad to be here today. The work that I have been doing is supporting people who are working with a life-threatening illness and bringing spiritual support to that process. And I’ve been doing that now for thirty-five plus years. (Read More)

The Shadow of Death

The dying long have been marginalized, even ignored, in our modern society. In response to this tragic enactment of our collective denial of death, the hospice movement and the conscious dying movement in recent years have emerged and flourished. (Read More)

Healing Path

We all want and need healing. Healing from physical disease, from emotional wounding, from clinging to the conceptual, healing from the disconnection with the sacred in our lives, we each in our own way are striving to find a greater sense of wholeness. (Read More)

How We Heal

Being intimate with death for the past twenty years increasingly has forced me to find ways to heal the aspects of myself that feel separate from God, from my own nature, from others. (Read More)

Before The First Step

For over twenty years, I have been blessed to be in close contact with many people who were approaching death. Almost all of these people were reaching out for healing–healing in relationship to death, healing in relationship to illness, in relationship to a wounded heart, to separation from their own self. (Read More)

What’s Normal?

Should we really get back to normal, the norm before 9/11? Are shopping and investing enough? I hope not. Something has noticeably shifted for many Americans and we have an opportunity that goes far beyond the old norm. (Read More)

Pilgrimage

Late this past summer I went on a pilgrimage to remote Western Tibet, circumambulating Mt Kailash and the nearby Lake Manasarovar. This journey was physically challenging, (Read More)

Collective Healing

In past newsletters we have investigated the path to healing for the individual, a path that begins with a deep appreciation of the preciousness of life, the inevitability of death, and the uncertainty of the moment of death. (Read More)

Poorest of the Poor

Gandhi, when asked how we should choose to live our lives, suggested that we ask ourselves “How will our next action affect the poorest of the poor?” (Read More)

Conscious Dying

Thirty years ago the conscious dying movement was born in the modern West. Basically, conscious dying is the process of utilizing the dying process as an opportunity to become more present and loving, an opportunity for profound healing, for spiritual awakening. (Read More)

Compassion

What is an ideal death? Qualities such as going beyond fear, feeling deeply connected with loved ones, and realizing oneness with the Divine, with God, (Read More)

Gratitude

For many years the Living/Dying Project offered all of our client services free of charge and covered its basic operating expenses through individual donations and a few grants. Basically we were not a business. (Read More)

Constancy and Change

The Living/Dying Project was the first organization in the United States whose mission was to offer conscious, spiritual support to those with critical illnesses. (Read More)

Balance

This past spring and summer Phil was my Living/Dying Project client. Phil was 48 years old and lived a mile up the hill from me with his wife Joelle and their son Philip who had his third birthday during our time together. (Read More)

Almost Unbearable

We are all going to die but don’t know when. Life is precious. These truths are traditionally contemplated to motivate a spiritual seeker to persist, with patience and trust, (Read More)